QGIS Planet

I quite often get requests for my training materials and learning
materials for FOSSGIS in general. Last week I was sent an email from The
University of Nottingham, UK, who have been setting up a portal to
collate FOSS GIS learning resources. The portal is
here http://elogeo.nottingham.ac.uk/xmlui/ I haven't gone through
the portal in depth, but my quick scan through it looks like it has some
interesting and useful resources.

Things have been busy – I just back from training course in Tanzania,
and last week I was giving a lecture and practical at
the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Lecturer Kevin Musungu from
the Civil Engineering and Surveying Department at Cape Technikon asked
us to give a presentation on open source GIS after meeting Tim at the
QGIS workshop
earlier this year. We were happy to introduce them to open source GIS
and QGIS as they had currently had no exposure to this side and relied
heavily on propriety GIS software. The Head of Department also came to
sit in the lecture and had some good questions regarding open source as
an alternative.

The class were third-year BTech surveying students that were doing a
course in GIS. Some of them are already involved in the working
environment, such as the SA governmental Department of Rural Development
and Land Affairs. Another visiting attendee was planning to put GIS into
a practical, live project to assist his community.

The lecture started off with an introduction to the FOSS movement, with
some background on how it started. We then went onto open source GIS,
along with a few case studies of open source GIS. This included the
Department of Land Affair's Introduction to GIS resources, mention of
theOpenModeller project and AFIS project. Then I went onto QGIS,
introducing the software and some of the features, along with a demo.

Later that week, we followed up with a practical using QGIS and showing
how it could achieve the same results that they did their practical test
in ArcGIS. Added to that the students were all given discs to take home
(thank you to Kevin for organising this) and will be able to use QGIS at
home.

I explained to them the different ways on how to get help: through the
user manuals, wiki's, forums, IRC and mailing lists. Feedback from the
class was good One of the students commented on the user friendliness of
the interface and another was interested in doing an internship on open
source GIS technology.

I'm back in Dar es Salaam for a training workshop (2 days QGIS, 1 day
openModeller). Sam Lee Pan and Chris Yesson have joined me to help with
presentation. Sam introduced herself in an earlier blog post and
Chris is an ex-colleague from my time working for the University of
Reading, UK. Chris has excellent knowledge of ecological niche modelling
and its a real pleasure to have him joining us to share his knowledge
with the course attendees.

The course is being held at the Dar es Salaam University's Institute of
Technology. We have around 30 attendees who come from academia and state parastatals.

It's always refreshing to present QGIS courses and see how well received
the software is and how easy it is for new users to pick up and get
running with quickly.

During the course of the day we covered loading vector data,
symbolisation, labelling and basic digitising.

The training course is part of the final stages of the work we have been
doing for GBIF. Our work adds several new tools (non spatial table
support, raster calculator, CSW client overhaul, darwin core data
provider, openModeller plugin) - some of which have been added into the
core of QGIS and will be in the upcoming QGIS 1.6 release.

We ended the day with a free form 'map a beautiful map' session and I
was really impressed with the quality of work the attendees produced -
all of them created nice neat projects with several layers, labels,
customised symbology and so on. I'm going to try to take some
screenshots of a few of the better ones tomorrow and post them here for
the world to see ... until then, happy QGIS'sing!

Horst and I are spending the week up in Johannesburg at the Satellite
Applications Center in Hartebeeshoek. We are doing yet another week
long training course (I hope I'm not working the poor guy too hard :-P
). This time we are doing:

- Two days QGIS (with a little GRASS)

- One day PostGIS

- Two days geospatial programming with Bash, Python and QGIS

Tomorrow we start with the PostGIS component. Horst and I have been
compiling some course notes for the PostGIS module which we are making
available to the world as per usual. The pdf still has some rendering
issues - we are aware of that. The document tries to walk the reader
through the basics of using SQL and then some basic activities with
PostGIS and working with geometries.

I hope some of you out there find it useful - let us know if you do!
Also if you have any improvements to make, we'd love to hear from you.

This week I conducted a 3 Day GeoDjango course. We had 11 particpants
consisting of SITA (South African State Information Technology Agency)
employees and interns, and other non-SITA employees. The course was
given free in order to promote skills development in Open Source GIS,
and the lab facilities were donated by SITA, Perseus Park, Pretoria,
South Africa.

It was really great to meet the attendees and I hope the course sowed a
seed of interested in them that will prompt them to go off and make
beautiful open source web sites powered by GeoDjango!